Wednesday, 4 July 2012

Sweeping Up....

Yesterday
I finally installed this exhibition of my ‘crapola’ still lives at the college
I work at, Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form, ahead of our annual Arts Festival
this Saturday, the 7th.

Since
making the commitment that this is what I would show this year, I’ve been
working really hard on pushing forward with these small paintings in the last
few weeks and trying to make some sort of statement in relation to the
‘Edgelands’ with them. I’ve made over 30, and installed 28 in the exhibition. I
think I’m pretty pleased, but I’m not entirely sure. The response from people
has been very positive, however so that’s great. When I completed my last one
on Sunday night I did feel that I had come to the end of this particular road
for now, and it would be good to return to my landscape work. I’m a bit
exhausted by them.

It does
feel like it has been worthwhile though, and in a way my first statement within
my edgelands project. It’s good now to draw a line under them, and move on.
This is the statement (below) that I decided to present alongside the work…

'Over the last few months whilst out and
about in cafes, restaurants and motorway service stations I have become a
little obsessed with scooping up my bits of leftover packaging, empty cups and
cartons and screwed up paper bags and stuffing them in my jacket pockets to
take back to the studio to make these small still life paintings. As I have
made more of them and hung them on the studio wall I felt they have slowly begun
to develop and suggest possible layers of meaning related to the increasing
banalization of culture in our globalized and corporate controlled society.

This
society’s values are reflected in the reduced edgelands landscape of motorway
service stations and retail parks. In this society the pursuit of profit is
considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, and turnover the
absolute priority. Individual identity seems to become more and more lost and
the world reduced to familiar signs and symbols encouraging us to buy more,
consume more.

The single,
empty cups and ephemera represent this loss of identity and also the solitude
in which people today live. A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless
and false images concerning the world. The paintings of brushes standing up in
turps filled jars represent this painter’s attempt to paint and reclaim a more
tangible reality and a more personal interaction with the world. I don’t view
painting as an outdated activity in the digital age.

Today,
to try and paint is an act of resistance instigating hope.'

Shaun
Morris,

July
2012

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised to have ended up here too. That's what excites me about them in the end....